“I’ll Do Anything For A Fashion Moment”: The Rise And Rise Of Adéla

It’s 9pm on a Tuesday and I’m four floors underground at a sweaty central London club. Surrounding me are roughly 2,000 Gen Zers in pink wigs and fishnets chanting – between surreptitious vape puffs – the lyrics to a then unreleased song. “I got boys, like a vending machine,” voices boom around me as Adéla, her lithe ballet dancer’s figure clad in a denim-and-rhinestone bralette and hot pants, flips her hair Baywatch-style and kicks her leg so far it flies all the way back over her head. (They’re the kind of moves that, if I attempted them, paramedics would have to be called.) There’s peak-Britney choreo for the bangers, peak-Xtina vocals on the ballads, cheeky foul-mouthed banter in between – she commands the stage like a veteran.

Twelve hours later, the Slovakian pop renegade bounces around a light-filled rehearsal room at the English National Ballet School, spinning like a whirling dervish in a black Chanel gown for her British Vogue shoot, still in the thick of an August heatwave. If Adéla is tired, she doesn’t let on. “I think because I’m 22… that helps,” she says with a mischievous grin as we sit down afterwards, running her talon-like acrylic nails through her signature pink locks. (She’s recently dyed her hair a deeper, dirtier magenta in place of her previous pastel hue: “My fans say I gain more power the pinker my hair gets.”) Her gaze falls on the ballet barres and mirrored walls, and she pauses: Adéla has history here, having moved from Bratislava to study dance in these exact rooms as a 15-year-old. “I met one of my best friends, Luca, here – he was my first fan,” she recalls. “He was like, ‘I feel like you could be a pop star.’ So I have fond memories of this place.”

Adéla’s journey to becoming this year’s most-buzzed-about music breakout has been uncommonly well documented. Originally cast in 2023 as a contestant for the K-pop reality show that formed Katseye, she was booted out early partly because – despite becoming a fan favourite in Netflix’s subsequent docuseries – the judges sensed she was destined for solo stardom. She seized upon the exposure, independently releasing her early songs and music videos, and building a cult following among internet pop savants, then signing with Capitol Records in 2025 and releasing her debut EP, The Provocateur, last summer to rave reviews. (The eye-popping album artwork features Adéla pulling up her dress and urinating in the street – you can understand why she was never built for the clean-cut confines of a manufactured pop group.)

And when I meet her, Adéla is on the precipice of her biggest leap yet: just over a week later, she’s releasing her debut album, Prima, and its third single, “Ain’t In LA”, is surging up the charts globally. The song, which recalls the world-dominating hits of Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz era, is a celebration of the cool girls in “unknown cities” around the world – “It’s all a lie, the baddest bitches ain’t in LA,” she sings on the euphoric chorus – and the video features Adéla running through the streets of Bratislava, posing with breakdancing kids in Slovak folk costumes, and rolling around with her mum and younger sister at home. (Both are in town for the concert and sit to watch her pose for the shoot, visibly beaming with pride.) The most recent single, “Nicole Kidman”, is also fast becoming a viral sensation, with a video referencing some of the actor’s most iconic roles (“Moulin Rouge, my corset is so tight”) and her internet-favourite AMC advert; Kidman herself is a fan, calling Adéla “so talented”.

Her label didn’t think “Ain’t In LA” should be a single and she had to push for it, she says. “There are so many forces at play that pull you a thousand different directions when you’re an artist – and they want what’s best for you. It’s not like they’re evil, but they might pull you away from something really great.” Her assessment of why they might not have understood it initially is equally frank: “I think the people in my label didn’t necessarily resonate with it because they’re LA rich kids. No shade, but they are. And that’s what a lot of the music industry is.”

It’s that candour – and wry sense of humour – that has endeared her to her rapidly growing fanbase: more than three million across Instagram and TikTok (and counting). She’s still learning to navigate the intensity of that fame, especially as some fans have pushed back about her switching up her sound from the gnarly electroclash of her EP to the more polished pop of Prima: “Going on socials and seeing what everybody’s saying… I guess I’m going to learn how to deal with that.” She visibly steels herself. “It’s definitely tough.”

That meteoric rise has already turned her into a fashion-world darling: working with creative director Chris Horan – Charli xcx’s longtime stylist and a key architect of the Brat-osphere – she’s already scored a Mac Cosmetics campaign, a front-row seat at Saint Laurent’s Paris Fashion Week show and a killer Marc Jacobs look at the CFDA Awards, complete with skyscraper platforms. “I had to hold onto somebody [to walk in them],” she says, with a deep laugh. “They kept passing me to each other like I was a baby the entire event. But I’ll do anything for a fashion moment.”

Adéla is a devoted scholar of pop stardom and lights up when I mention the crowd the previous night cosplaying as her in their wigs and leg warmers. (The most popular look? Hot-pink T-shirts reading: “The baddest bitches are in London”.) “That’s definitely a thing that I think every good pop star has,” she says. “When I was nine, I used to wear a half-down ponytail every day of my life because of Ariana Grande.” It feels like that’s who Adéla is doing it all for: not the fans online, not entirely for herself today, but for that young girl growing up in Bratislava with posters of Ariana and Miley and Beyoncé on her wall. “I wanted to make an album that I knew if I listened to it when I was nine, 10, 11, I would’ve been like, ‘This is sick.’”

Top look: Dress, Dior. Hair: Masaki Kameda. Make-up: Bea Sweet. Nails: Ella Vivii. With thanks to the English National Ballet School, SW10